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Using collective agreement and strike data from the Canadian Federal and provincial jurisdictions for the years 1978–2019, this study examines the effect that various legislative regimes that govern public‐sector bargaining disputes have on the incidence, duration and cost of conflict. This study seeks to replicate and improve previous estimates related to this topic but also extends the analysis to examine changes to the legal environment in Canada in which labour rights have been increasingly enshrined in constitutional law through the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This study finds, in contrast to previous studies, that the legislative regime impacts the way agreements are settled when disputes occur but not the likelihood of a directly negotiated agreement prior to impasse. It also highlights some differences in contract and wage settlements prior to and after the constitutionalization of labour rights in Canada.

This article is a minimum filmography about the fundamental issue of mobility. The films reviewed here represent Mexican workers who travel to Canada as temporary workers, thus, who are legal economic migrants. ...This article seeks to introduce the main problems of SAWP [Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program] in the framework of an approach that takes place in the 2020’s; presenting the activists’ struggle, pointing out SAWP’s problems for the families affected and with regard to the process of temporary workers soliciting Canadian citizenship. I analyze five films produced over the last 15 years and present them chronologically to discover how seasonal agricultural workers’ participation in the programs signed by Mexico and Canada is documented.

In June 2024, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada announced impending new pilot programs for migrant care workers. While the announcement brings hope that “new pilot programs will provide home care workers with permanent residence on arrival in Canada,” this report identifies persistent problems with Canada’s migrant care worker programs and demonstrates why permanency upon arrival is a requisite for necessary program changes. Given the ongoing and structural issues of Canada’s migrant care worker programs, the newest pilot programs will also need other critical improvements to ensure dignified work and meaningful inclusion for much-needed care workers in Canada. --Website summary

This qualitative research study examines how the Labour Market Integration (LMI) site constitutes a site of ongoing colonial violence and spirit injury, where race plays a central role in legitimizing the politics of credential recognition, in which Foreign Educated Racialized Immigrant Women (FERIW) are evicted from the category “qualified” in Canada. My analysis draws upon concepts of racial capitalism and structural violence to locate the acts of eviction that FERIW are subjected to within the LMI space in Canada and the consequences and impacts of this eviction. I argue that racialized immigration on the move to Canada represents the human face of Canada’s ongoing nation-building and economic policy agenda. The LMI space reinforces and reproduces the colonial racial hierarchical order in Canada. Based on qualitative interviews with 12 FERIW, I explore how within the LMI space, racialized immigrant women are stripped of their foreign credentials, discursively framed as unqualified and deficient, and repurposed as a source of cheap labour within the political economy. Delegitimization carries severe material and socio-economic consequences. The intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and immigrant status results in FERIW becoming “ghettoized” into low-paying, precarious, low-end jobs, and, for many of these women, low income and poverty. This work represents a decolonial work articulated through anti-colonial and feminist anti-racist theory, to present a nuanced historical account of the experiences of gendered racialized immigrant labour within global and local structures that look very similar to the old structures of colonialism.

The 2024 review of the Labour Relations Code, only the second in more than two decades, comes at a critical juncture for labour relations in British Columbia. It is imperative that this review bring a comprehensive package of reforms to markedly improve workers’ abilities to meaningfully exercise their statutory rights to organize and engage in collective bargaining in the current context of fissured workplaces and increasingly insecure work arrangements in many sectors of the BC economy. --Website summary

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice has approved a $30 million settlement resolving class action lawsuits regarding the employment status of players in the Canadian Hockey League’s Ontario Hockey League (OHL), Western Hockey League (WHL), and Québec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL). The decision comes after a complex legal battle spanning nearly a decade, affecting approximately 4,286 amateur hockey players. But it still needs to be approved by courts in Alberta and Quebec.

A detailed look at the experiences of migrant and immigrant women’s working conditions in low-wage essential sectors in Nova Scotia before, during, and following the most acute periods of the COVID-19 pandemic, this report draws on 27 in-depth, qualitative interviews.... --Website summary

This paper examines freedom of association in Canada. In particular, it traces why Canada’s constitutional protection of freedom of association has developed only slowly and principally in the union context so far, reaching in a struggling way toward what I call “half a constitutional freedom”. --Introduction

We’re starting the New Year in an upstream frame of mind, bringing you the brightest thinking from a June 2023 Parkland Institute conference, An Economy for Everyone: Mobilizing and implementing a well-being economy in Alberta. --Editor's introduction

The evidence presented in this report runs counter to arguments that card-check and anti-scab legislation give excessive power to workers over employers. Rather, card-check certification and a replacement worker ban are fundamental to upholding workers rights within Canada’s labour relations system. The right to join a union and the right to strike are two foundational aspects of Canadian labour relations. Testimonials from workers in this report make clear that mandatory votes suppress workers’ freedom to join a union without coercion from anti-union employers. --Website summary

Drawing on the framework of racial capitalism, this paper highlights two distinct but related dynamics of racial differentiation in relation to Amazon in Greater Toronto Area (GTA): at the level of the region’s broader political economy and within Amazon’s warehouses. I outline the ways in which the e-commerce giant both exploits and (re)makes the racialized geography of the GTA. Amazon’s capitalization on neoliberal austerity and corporate welfare perpetuates class and racialized inequalities. These processes adversely affect these suburban localities and negatively impact employment in both quantitative and qualitative ways. In this context, I argue that Amazon’s success has been, in no small part, due to its exploitation of Canada’s racially stratified labour market. Within the warehouse, the notion that digital Taylorism produces an undifferentiated workforce and a uniform labour process is interrogated. Instead, workers’ own accounts point to the ways digital technologies enable management to generate racial/ethnic differentiation and further squeeze value from workers. By situating Amazon within this specific socio-historical and political economic context, I demonstrate that the GTA offers a case study through which to examine the racial dynamics of digital capitalism and show that racialized and gendered social relations inflect the uneven experiences of algorithmic management.

Job security has always been a paramount concern for the trade union movement. This article explores the ways that unions used collective bargaining to gain a measure of job security for their members in the face of deindustrialization as unionized factories in North America began to close in large numbers after the 1970s. These new measures included advance notice, severance pay, plant closing moratoria, restrictions placed on plant movements, transfer rights, and expanding the scope of collective ‘social’ bargaining to cover training and adjustment. In some sectors, such as automotive, collective bargaining has also been extended into areas normally left to management. The price was often high. Eventually some unions, notably the Canadian Auto Workers (established 1985; part of Unifor after 2013), prioritized winning new capital investments and product lines for unionized plants in their negotiations, though often at the cost of jobs, wage freezes or reductions, and other concessions. By focusing upon auto sector deindustrialization in Canada since the 1980s, we draw lessons from more recent union bargaining strategies, and how they constitute an important element of worker responses to industrial job loss and manufacturing closure.

The article reviews the book, "The Happiness of the British Working Class," by Jamie L. Bronstein.

This book brings together the vast research literature about gender and technology to help designers understand what a gender perspective and a focus on intersectionality can contribute to designing information technology systems and artifacts, and to assist organizations as they work to develop work cultures that are supportive of women and marginalized genders and people. Drawing on empirical and analytical studies of women's work and technology in many parts of the world, the book addresses how to make invisible aspects of work visible; how to recognize women's skills without falling into the trap of gender stereotyping; how to engage in improving working conditions; and how to defend care of life situations and needs against a managerial logic. It addresses challenges for design, including many overlooked and undervalued aspects, such as the complexities involved in human–machine interactions, as well as the need to create safe spaces for research subjects. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Distant Stage: Quebec, Brazil, and the Making of Canada's Cultural Diplomacy," by Eric Fillion.

This introductory human resource management (HRM) textbook provides students with an overview of the major domains of human resource management (the “how-to”) with a focus on the practical application of the most recent HRM research and best practices. Students will learn to understand, anticipate, and respond to how power, profit, and intersectionality shape the practice of HRM. Moving beyond the typical procedure-oriented textbook, Barnetson and Foster provide thought-provoking political analysis to better prepare students for the real-world practice of human resource management. --Publisher's description

British Columbia was the site of some of the most significant events in the history of the labour movement and had some of the best-organized and most politically conscious communist workers. In this illuminating volume, Jon Bartlett follows the activities of BC Communists from the onset of the Great Depression to the coming of the Popular Front and investigates the collisions between these Communists and the organs of the federal, provincial, and municipal governments. Reflecting on the vectors of cultural resistance, from the creation of vernacular newspapers to the circulation of popular song and verse, Bartlett charts workers’ efforts to resist wage cutbacks in mines, mills, and the logging and fishing industries and describes the organization of opposition to the relief camps and its outcomes. -- Publisher's description

This paper delves into the implications of Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) through the lens of international human rights law (IHRL), spotlighting the nuanced effects on migrant agricultural workers' rights. Originating in 1966, the SAWP has been pivotal in recruiting labour from Mexico and the Caribbean to bolster Canada's agricultural sector. The paper critiques the program's core policies, notably the restrictive employment system that ties workers to specific employers and the significant barriers to obtaining permanent residency (PR) and citizenship. These policies are scrutinized for their potential violation of fundamental human rights, including the rights to equality, liberty and security, and access to justice, under both Canadian and international legal frameworks. A comprehensive analysis is presented, underpinning Canada's obligations under IHRL and the apparent discrepancies within its treatment of SAWP participants. The study proposes substantial policy reforms aimed at rectifying these discrepancies, advocating for a transition towards open work permits, and establishing clear pathways to PR and citizenship for SAWP workers. The research underscores the necessity for Canada to reconcile its labour demands within the agricultural sector with its human rights obligations, ensuring a fair and humane treatment of migrant workers who play a crucial role in the country's economy.

In this dissertation, I draw on Frantz Fanon’s concepts of cultural imposition and collective catharsis to examine how the colonized subject, like the incarcerated Black worker, undergoes a double process of dehumanization wherein they are perceived as both an invisible and hypervisible subject. I argue that the colonized subject is invisible insofar as they are subjected to various forms of dehumanization such as physiological and psychological abuse, lack of access to resources, and neglect. However, they are also perceived as hypervisible because they are viewed as existing in excess as hypersexual, hyper deviant, and hyper criminal creatures and therefore deserving of the treatment they endure. Similarly, the incarcerated worker is viewed as invisible and hypervisible because they are viewed as unskilled and subhuman beings undeserving of adequate pay and protections but are also perceived as best suited to work in poor conditions doing less skilled, undervalued, low-paying work. By tracing how this relationship between race, racialization and labour is underpinned by whiteness both historically and in a contemporary sense, I demonstrate how the use of prison labour within a Canadian multicultural context must necessarily be read through a normalizing white gaze, under the guise of public safety and rehabilitation; here the prison functions as a disciplinary site wherein Black and racialized prisoners are constructed as inferior beings in need of heightened control through labour. In doing so, I argue that the use of prison labour in Canadian prisons is a form of colonial violence that reproduces inferior and superior colonial identities.

Falling Short is the third community report released by the Migrant Workers in the Canadian Maritimes Partnership. The report follows the publication of Safe at Work, Unsafe at Home: COVID-19 and Temporary Foreign Workers in Prince Edward Island in 2021 and Unfree Labour: COVID-19 and Migrant Workers in the Seafood Industry in New Brunswick in 2023. The report is based on desk research and worker interviews. Data was obtained from freedom of information requests to Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) and Nova Scotia’s regulatory bodies responsible for work safety, employment standards, and housing. 15 interviews with migrant workers in Nova Scotia employed under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) were also conducted. Fourteen of these workers were employed under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) stream of the TFWP, and one worker was employed under the low-wage stream of the TFWP. Falling Short found that in Nova Scotia, migrant workers frequently encounter a lack of regulatory implementation. Rules exist, but governments are failing to adequately enforce them to create a safe and dignified work environment for migrant workers. The report provides recommendations to both the federal and provincial governments aimed at improving the working and living conditions of the temporary migrant workforce in the province. --Website description